Gerritsen Frans

Gerritsen, Frans Frans Gerritsen and his wife (later ex-wife), Henny de Haan*, lived in Haarlem and were involved in the underground from the outbreak of the war. Frans was a graphic artist whose specialty was the forging of rubber stamps and identity cards, and he also helped those trying to cross borders, preparing “Swedish papers” with which one could cross into Vichy and find hiding places on the way. Frans and Kurt Hanneman, one of the leading Jewish pioneers, or halutzim, and a leading member of the Westerweel* group, found a way to detach stamps from documents by immersing them in a chemical solution so that they could then be transferred to forged documents with the seal intact. In this way, he could produce new identity cards. Frans and Kurt replaced the official serial numbers with numbers of their own and thus created a whole new fictitious series. At the same time, Frans and Henny, who had twins born on August 27, 1942, and later had two more children, also hid Paula Kaufman and Norbert Klein. Frans himself helped Norbert escape from the hospital where he was being kept under Gestapo surveillance. As part of the Westerweel group, Frans also helped 16 Haverim escape from Westerbork and two to escape from Vught. He was also instrumental in spiriting people---including Lore Zimels---away from the Hollandsche Schouwburg, the central deportation station in Amsterdam. Once, on a mission to Belgium with some refugees, Frans was arrested but released after a few hours. In May 1944, after an unsuccessful attempt to free Joop Westerweel from the Vught prison, the Sipo learned Frans’s full name and he and his family were forced to go underground. With their four children, the Gerritsens moved into a shed built by Frans. In the terrible months of famine in the winter of 1944--1945, Frans, disguised as an old man, crisscrossed the country in search of food until the liberation in May 1945. On June 16, 1964, Yad Vashem recognized Frans Gerritsen as RighteousAmong the Nations.